‘My depression ate me up and stopped me doing the thing in life I loved the most – cooking’

Months into a period of depression, devoted foodie Mike Daw stopped cooking. Here, in a personal and moving essay, he recalls how he went from revelling in the joy of meals to having an irrational fear of them. He also shares the surprising ingredients that helped him begin to recover

‘For dinner, for ceremony, I’d spend an hour or two on the broth’ (Getty)

Three months into my second round of intensive cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), I was describing to Joanna, my patient and forgiving therapist, an argument I’d just had about doing the washing up. I was trying to explain the enormity of it, how crippling it was, the gut-wrenching aversion I had, not to this task in particular, but anything that wrought me from the insular, lonely cocoon I’d slowly fashioned. It was a punishing, tearful argument, fought over three pans, a chopping board, two bowls and some chopsticks. We’d cooked a ruined ramen. We’ll come back to ramen.

Describing to Joanna the expletive-filled row, and after exhaustive descriptors of feeling lost, misunderstood, alone and sick, she calmly responded: “Well, of course you feel like that. You have depression.”

There’s a common analogy when dealing with depression and addiction: the two boats. You awake on a small boat in the middle of a tumultuous ocean. You possess no oar and there is no land in sight. You have no recollection of how you ended up here but here you are, destined for oblivion, inescapably alone, adrift on the choppy sea. Two dots appear on the horizon and slowly, like an approaching mirage, they morph into the shape of two boats. Stranded, you can only board one of the vessels, and herein lies the choice. The first boat will save you, the second will tell you how you got here.